Thread: Who or what should we blame for the lack of lucidity ?

Small update: I'm reading about the precuneus, and it gets more and more interesting. Look this abstract from Parietal cortex and representation of the mental Self (just the link, not the pdf):

To determine whether medial parietal cortex in this network is essential for episodic memory retrieval with self-representation, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation over the region to transiently disturb neuronal circuitry. There was a decrease in the efficiency of retrieval of previous judgment of mental Self compared with retrieval of judgment of Other with transcranial magnetic stimulation at a latency of 160 ms, confirming the hypothesis. This network is strikingly similar to the network of the resting conscious state, suggesting that self-monitoring is a core function in resting consciousness.

Can we kidnap Sageous and put him under a fmri and analyze the level of activity in his precuneus during REM when compared to control? Pretty please ?
What's curious is that his idea of self-awareness, while always being completely unrelated to any neuroscience talk, it's remarkly similar: self-assessment, self-perception, and self-monitoring (which is a +1 for self-awareness imo).
On another topic, I'd love to see in that study how did the test subjects reached lucidity. Maybe the type and degree of activation depends on the technique? Maybe a simple reality check would be less effective than an actual self-awareness "habit" (I still didn't answer to Sageous's reply regarding this word I recall now). Or maybe it isn't about what you do to reach lucidity, could we actually increase brain activity in all the areas as long as we reached (at least) minimal lucidity? Like climbing the stairs.

Spoiler for Quick Response to Sageous on why there's so much attention to this thread regarding induction and not the experience as a whole:

"By the way Sageous, I'll explain why my perspective in this thread is so much about lucid dreaming induction, and not the rest: it's because for the nature of the topic VagalTone made, induction is extremely relevant. Wouldn't you agree that 10 low-level lucids would be more helpful to a beginner than 2 high-level lucids? What you want is quantity in order to have more chances to eventually improve quality right? Don't shut down on this one, we're not discarding the relevance about the state of the consciousness itself, we're just discussing if it's not equally feasible - I'm gonna talk here in really straight-forward terms - induce low-level lucidity and go from there. Wouldn't you agree that way more people would lucid dream if they could experience the effects of low self-awareness skills in a series of lucids that would come by much more frequently in the first weeks/months? I got the luck of having loads of lucid dreams in the first weeks that I tried, but many people practice for months, and you practiced for years.

Back to the brain talk: thought experiment (gogo StephL):

- Assuming that people like Sageous would have an greater overall activity on precuneus (disregarding the other parts now because it's just a test), was it possible that we could correlate lucid dreaming frequency with precuneus activity? Because:

Functional imaging has linked the precuneus to the processes involved in self-consciousness, such as reflective self-awareness, that involve rating ones own personality traits compared to those judged of other people.

If we could use that personality trait test on a range of lucid dreamers in the forum....wouldn't necessarily be causal, but if there was a correlation...would be worth the try ?

PS: Incase you're not much of a neuroscience's talk fan, here's an article explaining the article linked by Steph. Bonus: loads of lucid dreaming references that can be used to the discussion (I think I can link the pdf of some of them here if someone asks for them).

edit: it's on the PS StephL (it's not a scientific article, just a blog post commentating the study).